Paper: “moral panic” behind attempts to link games, violence

Texas A&M University's Christopher Ferguson has been a forceful critic of …

It seems like it's rare for a month to go by without a story appearing in the popular press in which the frequent enjoyment of violent games by today's youth is linked to a specific violent act by members of said youth. Behind the press reports, the academic community has been engaged in a hot debate over whether the evidence supports a connection between the violent content of games and any behavioral effects. One of the researchers who has argued forcefully that it's not is Christopher Ferguson, who has just published a paper that argues that the continued societal focus on games as a causal factor in violence is an example of what's termed a "moral panic."

We've covered some of Ferguson's past work. In general, he's argued that most of the studies that link violence with violent behavior use nonstandard experimental measures of violent tendencies and don't correlate those with actual violent actions. Further, the fact that youth violence has dropped as violent games have proliferated suggests we're looking for causation when the correlation doesn't even exist.

He makes those points again in this new paper, which is a literature review and focused argument rather than a research paper. But Ferguson continues with an examination of whether the overall trends—declining violence in an era of rising violence in content—might mask the existence of a population that's distinctly at risk from this content. He draws an analogy to food allergies, writing that violent games "could be arguably synonymous to peanut butter: a perfectly harmless indulgence for the vast majority, but potentially harmful to a tiny minority."

To get there, he focuses on events that are most frequently used as a justification for linking gaming to violent behavior: school shootings. These events are so rare, though, that very little in the way of profiling their perpetrators has been done. Ferguson relies on two reports, one from the FBI, and another performed jointly by the US Secret Service and Department of Education. The FBI analysis specifically cautioned that that the data behind its profile was very sparse, and that it should only be used to evaluate the credibility of a threat after it had been made.

These reports also make a point that is similar to the one emphasized in a recent study that showed that violent content is often inextricably linked to the sense of immersion and achievement provided by popular games. The authors of the FBI report suggest that playing games with violent content should only be seen as worrisome if the individual "seems more interested in the violent images than the game itself." The Secret Service found that only about 60 percent of perpetrators were interested in violent media of any kind, which stands in sharp contrast to surveys that show that nearly 90 percent of kids play games with violent content.

Feeling that he's successfully detailed the lack of evidentiary support linking games and violent behavior, Ferguson moves on to consider why it seems that the public fixates on it as a cause in the aftermath of violent events. He concludes that it is an example of a "moral panic." Although he doesn't define the term himself (instead, he refers readers to the literature on the matter), most definitions of moral panic suggest it occurs when large segments of society uncritically blame a phenomenon for undermining their society's order. If he's right, then gaming has joined everything from Dungeons & Dragons to Elvis in that category.

Ferguson is hardly the first to reach that conclusion; nearly two years ago, we reported on a sociologist that used different terminology in concluding that violent games acted as a "folk devil," allowing society to assign blame in a case where the root causes of an issue actually were a component of the society's order.

Ferguson, however, goes a step further by arguing (in part by using a convenient flow chart) that violent games have entered a cycle where the media's reporting triggers research, the mere existence of which induces further reporting of the potential for a link. Meanwhile, the fact that a significant portion of the research produces negative or ambiguous results gets ignored. He goes on to cite instances where the omission of contrary studies has come up in court cases related to restrictions on games.

Overall, as mentioned above, the paper is more of an argument than anything else, but it's a fairly coherent argument, and one that Ferguson isn't alone in making. What's lacking from the paper is a clear description of how to stop the moral panic that seems to have developed.